Tag: iphone

Voltlog #282 – Did I get a trinocular microscope for micro-soldering and inspection?

Welcome to a new Voltlog, to save you from waiting, the short answer is yes, I did get a microscope for the lab but before I show you the microscope let’s talk about why I got a microscope and why you might want one. If you are occasionally soldering boards, electronic kits, mostly through hole components or even surface mount down to 0603 and you have good eyesight, then chances are, you don’t need such a microscope, I’ve been doing that for years.

On the other hand, if you want to be able to solder surface mount components smaller than 0603 comfortably or you want to do board level repairs on modern gadgets like smartphones and laptops, then you most definitely need a microscope as it will massively improve the quality of your soldering and the general repair process at your bench. 

Voltlog #273 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. Before I get started I’m gonna take a second to reminding you to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification icon because that’s the only way you will know for sure when I upload new videos. Now let’s start with this small esp32 based development board, it has a built-in 1.14 inch color tft lcd and I think that’s a nice feature of this dev board because if you want to connect some sensors and see the readings in real time, you don’t need to wire a display externally it’s built-in.

Another cool feature is that we have built-in battery charging at 500mA and you can power this board through the provided two pin jst connector with a one cell lipo battery which will then charge when connected to power via the USB Type-C port. There is also a CP2104 for the usb to serial conversion and that makes it a pretty well balanced development board for the ESP32.

The board comes loaded with a test program from TTGO, it shows this image then cycles through red, green, blue on the LCD which is a good idea because you can verify the board is functioning ok after the long journey it takes from the market in shenzhen to your door and we all know how well these packages are protected during shipping.

Voltlog #222 – InTheMail

Welcome to a new InTheMail, the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time. We’re gonna start with this insulation sheet, this was listed as ceramic fiber insulation blanket and it’s suppose to withstand high temperatures. Up to what temperature? I don’t know because the listing didn’t contain that information but it did say that it could be used on stoves so I would guess up to 300 degrees Celsius.

Voltlog #86 – Limiting Iphone USB Charging To 500mA

It all started a few days ago when I was talking with a friend and he suggested, since we do most of our phone charging at night, why not charge them at a lower rate for increase battery life. As you may know, when you increase the charging current, charging happens faster at the expense of losing battery life over time, you get fewer battery cycles before it starts losing its capacity.

So I decided to build this small gadget, that goes between the usb output of my charger and the usb plug from my charging cable. In my case I have an Iphone and the charging current can be limited to 500mA by having a set of resistors on the USB data lines.

Links for the parts used to build the project: